How lack of cooperation among agencies is fuelling illicit trade

Lack of coordination among border control agencies has widened the loophole through which counterfeits pour in months after a government directive reduced the number of State agencies at ports of entry.

Representatives of State agencies decried the poor collaboration during a county sentisation on combating illicit trade in Busia, in a scenario that may complicate efforts to combat the multibillion-shilling trade.

FIGHTING ILLICIT TRADE

The Anti-Counterfeit Agency, which is tasked with fighting counterfeits, is unable to see the Pre-Shipment Inspection data held by the Kenya Revenue Authority, which keeps the agency in the dark on the contents of consignments being imported.

ACA Regional Inspection Officer for Western Kenya Weldon Sigei said lack of access to the KRA’s Integrated Customs Management System denies the agency the intelligence it needs to profile imports for risks.

“We need to be able to access the KRA system to see what has been declared under the Pre-Export Verification of Conformity to Standards (PVOC) as a critical information that informs our targeted approach towards imports we may suspect to be counterfeits. Otherwise it will remain unbeneficial to us especially after the changes that saw agencies at the ports reduced,” Mr Sigei said.

Participants including security officials were particularly unhappy that the Kenya Bureau of Standards (Kebs) and the Kenya Plant Health Inspectorate Service (Kephis) were not even represented at the forum held in the border town between Kenya and Uganda, where illicit goods are smuggled through the porous borders.

The county government was also said to have been largely left out in the crackdown carried out in the border towns to combat illicit trade.

Busia County Executive for Trade Gregory Odeke said security officers and agency officials involved in fighting illicit trade in the area had left out county officials, with hostility sometimes playing out between the two levels of government.

“Sometimes we share intelligence and we are told the county governments have nothing to do with illicit trade. And you will find that it is not just county governments that are experiencing this, it is a case of the right hand not knowing what the left is doing. We must operate as one government, otherwise the war on counterfeits will not be easy to win,” Mr Odeke said.

In June, the government reduced the number of State agencies at the border points, sparking disquiet from some of the outfits that felt they were being “kicked out”.

A memo sent from State House on June 4 removed several agencies from the ports, including the National Intelligence Service, the Directorate of Criminal Investigations, the Kephis and the Anti-Counterfeit Agency, handing the ports to a selected few agencies.

Busia border point is known for allowing inflow of counterfeits including alcohol, cigarettes, assorted household goods and building materials from Uganda, which end up undercutting local firms and denying the government billions in tax revenue.

Additional reporting by Dennis Lubanga